1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to various methods, systems, computer program products, and other arrangements for remotely monitoring any of a variety of appliances or devices, for sending monitoring information across any of various networks, for receiving the monitoring information, and for storing and analyzing the monitored information.
2. Discussion of the Background
With-the advent of microprocessors, microprocessor-based appliances and devices have become more intelligent. In addition, the increase of networking through wireline and wireless technology makes communication among those intelligent appliances and devices possible. The next extension to this development is to create systems in which the configuration and status of these appliances and devices are monitored and sent by a monitoring system to a receiving system.
In order that information can be sent over non-secure networks such as the Internet, the information can be encrypted. Because a wide variety of encryption techniques are available, a user must choose which technique to encrypt and decrypt the emails, which level of encryption to use, and even whether to use encryption at all. However, conventional systems require that significant software modifications be made if the encryption/decryption technique is to be changed, if the level of encryption is to be changed, or even if a user wants no encryption. Such software modifications have involved more than swapping the encryption/decryption software itself: the software with which the encryption/decryption software cooperated also had to be modified. This requirement to substantially modify software other than the encryption/decryption software itself shows a lack of flexibility that has resulted in increased cost and time delay.